new DIP41: dmd/rdmd command line overhaul.

[Dicebot]

On Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 23:52:25 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> What it comes down to is that breaking changes must provide a 
> sufficiently high
> ROI, or they're unacceptable.

And what was the reason to take this as an axiom? What makes you 
think core D developers can decide for all other D users what is 
sufficiently high ROI and what is not? For _everyone_. And how do 
you define "sufficiently high"?

That is exactly what I call "intention-based stability". Your 
intentions are good and goal is noble but lack of strict rules 
make it essentially useless. Problem is, "stability" is not some 
abstract merit that can be measured. It is a certain expectation 
with pragmatical use cases.

One good way to make compiler/language stable is to ask "Why do 
people need it stable? What problems does it solve? How our 
guarantees help?". And most common answer for first question I 
have encountered so far : "Because people hate to spend time in 
the middle of project to fix unexpected issues from already 
working code base". Note that this has nothing to do with 
features, or ROI, or correctness, or whatever. It is all about 
expectation of a change. And despite all efforts, D falls 
miserably here. See current beta mailing list for several 
examples of what should have never happened in real stable 
development process.